Infinibox – Enterprise storage solution from Infinidat

During the SFD8 event recently, we had a presentation from Infinidat. A company lead by Moshe Yanai, a man who needs no words of introduction in storage industry. Infinibox is an enterprise storage array from Infinidat referred (by one of the presenter) to as Moshe v3.0, after EMC Symmetrix and IBM XIV.

Infinibox, being a new-player in the industry is a very big competition to the existing market leaders in the enterprise storage category. Let us discuss about the product and features in this post here.

Hardware : Infinibox hardware components have an N+2 protection including for their controllers. The system will be having 3 active-active nodes interconnected via an infiniband network. The disk enclosures (Up to 480 disk drives via 8 disk enclosures supported) will be connected to the nodes either directly or via daisy-chain connectivity. The system can have upto 3 TB of RAM.

In case of the active path failure or IO congestion , data will be sent over infiniband network to the secondary node and will be written to the end disk.

Software features and IO handling :The incoming data will be divided to 64KB blocks and will be written as 14+2 data stripes. But the data will be treated at 4K granularity at the cache level. This improves performance especially in case of random reads.

Unlike many other systems, Infinibox does not have dedicated hotspare drives. The system reserves small amount (5%) of space in disks for rebuilds in case of drive failure. With this rebuild capability the system can survive upto 12 drive failures even in case if the system is having 100% data written.

The snapshot mechanism with Infinibox is awesome with very less performance impact. With this feature, system can have huge number of snaps (~100k snaps/system) with no performance impact.

The system now supports NFS protocol, along with FC and iSCSI. SMB (and FICON connectivity) is not production now but will be soon available to customers which will make Infinibox a complete Unified array.

Conclusion : Infinibox have already got customer confidence over the industry leaders in enterprise storage and have a lot of systems sold. Infinidat is making huge efforts to ensure they are delivering the best to the customers – including the 3 weeks of burn-in for new systems before shipment . With the technology and engineering behind and many other attractions they are offering – including cost reduction to the customers – they have lot more to achieve in this industry.

Additional resources :

You may find additional reading here and presentation videos from the Tech Field Day website here.

Disclaimer: My travel and accommodation expenses for the SFD8 (Storage Field Day 8) event were paid by the Tech Field Day team. I am not requested to post about event content and I am not getting paid for any posts or for the time I spend during the event.